Zdena Salivarova, a Czech publisher and writer who established an émigré press that kept her country’s literature alive for years after Russian tanks stamped out Czechoslovakia’s renaissance in 1968, died on Aug. 25 in Toronto. She was 91.
Her death, in a hospital, was announced by Sarka Vamberova, the consul general of the Czech Republic in Toronto.
An accomplished writer, singer and actress in her own right, Ms. Salivarova was overshadowed by her famous husband, the novelist Josef Skvorecky, whose depiction of how individuals cope with the tyrannical Czech state made him one of his country’s leading late-20th-century writers, along with Vaclav Havel and Milan Kundera.
But in her own quiet way, Ms. Salivarova was instrumental in securing the fortunes of all three. She published their work, and that of many other writers, after establishing the publishing house 68 Publishers in the couple’s one-bedroom apartment, soon after they began their in exile, in 1971 in Toronto. Several years later, they were able to move the company to small offices there. Ms. Salivarova managed the operation, typeset the books, took them to the post office and sometimes sent them back across the Iron Curtain free of charge.
The name of the publishing company was a reference to August 1968, when the Soviet Union quashed the period of liberalization in Czechoslovakia known as the Prague Spring.
Mr. Skvorecky’s books had been outlawed by the Soviet-backed Communist regime; more than 200 writers were banned. In setting up 68 Publishers, the Skvoreckys had “gone into competition with Czechoslovakia’s official publishing establishment,” a New York Times reporter, Michael Kaufman, wrote after visiting the couple in 1983.
Mr. Skvorecky found the writers; Ms. Salivarova saw them into print.
By the time the company ceased operations in 1993, after the Velvet Revolution in Prague had overturned the Communist regime and made the couple’s work superfluous, they had published 227 books by dozens of exiled and underground writers, and some 12,000 people were on their mailing list.
Ms. Salivarova, the daughter of a Prague bookseller and publisher who was crushed successively by the Depression and the Communists, was the driving force.
“At a certain point she did almost everything: typeset, design, she hired people to do the art for the cover,” Paul Wilson, who was Mr. Skvorecky’s translator and knew the couple well, recalled in an interview. “She laid out the books. She was there all the time. She came in early and stayed late.”
The publishing enterprise was inspired by Ms. Salivarova’s restlessness when she found herself in a new land with nothing to do. Mr. Skvorecky had gotten a teaching job at the University of Toronto, and he spoke English. In her exile, she was jobless, adrift and monolingual.
“Her husband, concerned by her moodiness, had given her some prize money he won, in the hope that she would take a course as a dental technician or computer programmer,” Mr. Kaufman wrote in 1983.
Ms. Salivarova had other ideas. But Mr. Skvorecky was uneasy.
“Josef was very insecure, anxious, nervous,” Ms. Salivarova recalled in an interview contained in “The Achievement of Josef Skvorecky” (1994), a book of essays about her husband edited by Sam Solecki.
“He said, ‘What if we get bankrupt? Everybody in Prague will be so happy.’”
The company’s first book was Mr. Skvorecky’s unpublished early novel “The Republic of Whores” (1954), which another émigré group, in the U.S., had asked to publish. But she knew that wouldn’t work.
“They might find the language obscene, objectionable,” she said in a 1994 interview with Mr. Solecki. “So I told Josef that we should publish it ourselves.”
Ms. Salivarova said she reassured her husband, telling him that “we must do it this way.’’
“And in fact, we made enough money to publish another book, and another and another,” she added. “And two decades later, we’re still here.”
68 Publishers “was far and away the most important of the émigré publishing houses,” said Derek Sayer, an expert on Czech literature and an emeritus professor at the University of Alberta. “It basically kept Czech literature alive.” And, Mr. Sayer recalled, Mr. Skvorecky “was very insistent” that “she was the one who kept it going.”
It was a self-renouncing task, though Ms. Salivarova didn’t complain. She had put aside her own promising literary career to sustain the operation. Her novel “Honzlova” (1973, published in English as “Summer in Prague”) received good reviews. It told the story of a rebellious young woman, who like Ms. Salivarova herself was a singer in a state-sponsored folk-song choir, who gets in trouble with the authorities.
It went through four editions at 68 Publishers. But like her husband’s work, it was banned in Prague.
Zdenka Josefa Salivarova was born on Oct. 21, 1933, in Prague, one of four children of Jaroslav Salivar and Evzenie (Nosalova) Salivarova. In the 1930s, her father “lost a lot of money and we were very poor,” she said in 1994. His book-selling business nearly went under, she recalled, but it picked up somewhat under Nazi rule because “there was nothing to buy except books.”
His situation quickly worsened under the Communist regime after World War II. His business was confiscated — his daughter said he was the first Czech publisher to be so treated — and he was arrested and sentenced to two years in jail. His son Lumir was also arrested — “on trumped-up charges,” she said; “there were almost no other in those days” — and sentenced to 10 years in the Czech uranium mines.
Ms. Salivarova graduated from the Eliska Krasnohorska Girls’ Real Gymnasium in Prague in 1952. She failed to enter the city’s conservatory as a violinist — she studied with Jindrich Feld, but was not allowed to take the entrance exam because her father and brother “were already political prisoners.”
She then became a singer and traveled the world with the Czechoslovak State Song and Dance Ensemble. “I left because I was really fed up with singing the same folk songs over and over,” she told Mr. Solecki. “I was really longing to sing jazz.”
In the early 1960s she was an actress and singer in a cabaret theater. In 1965 — by that time married to Mr. Skvorecky, who was already an up-and-coming writer — she was admitted to the Academy of Performing Arts in Prague, where she studied script writing and worked under Mr. Kundera (“arrogant,” she recalled).
Mr. Kundera’s misogynistic treatment of his women characters “provoked” her, she said, into writing a collection of novellas published in 1968, “Panska Jizda” (“Gentleman’s Ride”). She also acted in several major films under leading Czech New Wave directors. The Prague Spring, she later recalled, was “a golden age, the best time of my life.”
Ms. Salivarova and her husband were vacationing in Paris when the Soviet tanks rolled into Prague. They decided to return in October 1968 so she could continue her studies, but “after three months she realized how terrible things were, so we left,” Mr. Skvorecky told an interviewer in 1985, as quoted in Mr. Sayer’s “Postcards From Absurdistan: Prague at the End of History” (2022).
They left on Jan. 31, 1969. Mr. Skvorecky had landed a teaching job at the University of California, Berkeley. She worked on her novel all day because, she told Mr. Solecki, “I didn’t speak any English and didn’t know anyone.” When they drove to Canada later that year, “the first thing Josef carried in to the motel was the suitcase with the manuscript of my novel.”
Ms. Salivarova leaves no immediate survivors.
The publishing business that was her legacy was, in her telling, almost an accident. “You know, when all this started I didn’t plan to be a publisher forever,” she told Mr. Solecki. “It was a solution to an immediate problem — what was I going to do in Canada, and how were we to publish Josef’s novel.”
Alain Delaquérière contributed research.
Adam Nossiter has been bureau chief in Kabul, Paris, West Africa and New Orleans, and is now a Domestic Correspondent on the Obituaries desk.
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